When working with servers or debugging a workstation, or even just out of curiosity, it’s geek friendly to make your linux kernel boot rather more than less verbose. In Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, and probably other Debian derivates as well, the default is to be rather quiet, and it’s a bit difficult to find how to make it verbose, without hard coding changes to /boot/grub/menu.lst. Such changes will be overwritten by update-grub, so that’s probably a bad idea.

So, we put this nice DL360 G7 in production, and found that networking on the iLO (integrated lights-out management) was not configured correctly. Now, the box was already running software, so it was a bit unpopluar to reboot it just to get iLO access again. Just for fun (sorry, I had not high hopes on their Linux support), I called HP support. They stated of course that this was not possible without rebooting the server and access the iLO setup through its BIOS.

Now, the HP iLO 3 should support IPMI, so after a bit of fiddling around, I came up with this, and it actually works. The following was executed on RHEL5.

Two years ago, we built the Gingerbread Millennium Falcon. Last year, we built the Gingerbread Vader’s Tie Fighter. What should we build this year? More Star Wars vehicles? After a bit heavy thinking, we came up with the emperial AT-AT Walker. Luckily, the web is full of pictures and sketches, so we found plenty of inspiration.

After four hours, the result exceeded all expectations! Happy advent everybody!